Rainy Days

Rainy Days

Every once in a while, Mother Nature sends us a little gift. Nothing too generous, just a little rain for a day or two. She decides we've had a bit too much sunshine for our own good, and resolves to remedy this herself. She pushes her spectacles up a little on the bridge her nose, sighs at the world, the sigh of a tired parent getting up from the couch to pull the TV remote out of a toddler's mouth, and turns on the faucet. I cannot be sure, but I have a hunch that she then reclines a little in her expensive chair, siezes her coffee from a nearby table and maybe crosses her legs, getting ready to watch the show.
As Mother Nature observes, the people of her creation react in different ways. Gardeners and movie theater CEO's rejoice: the former get a brief respite from their monotonous sprinkler routines, let the weather make the grass green for a change, and the latter acquire large amounts of a more literal green. A majority of the population uses rain as an excuse to make some hot chocolate and stare at the television for longer than they normally would. They see it as 'cozy' or 'relaxing', and hole up for hours with a book or a video game controller. Still others, a smaller portion of the population, see it as an obstacle, a temporary hindrance to their games of golf or tanning sessions on the sand, and they lose sleep over when it will finally abate. One small corner of the general public experiences some complex feelings when faced with rain. They become depressed, lose energy, and wonder if they should blame it on the weather and risk the cliche, or start work on a twenty-first century ark. These are the type of people that Mother Nature is really chastising with her cruel past-time.

I have become a puzzle piece of the latter corner. My childhood was different though: I would splash around in puddles and catch rain on my tongue, relishing the feeling of wet hair in my eyes, finishing with a towel handed to me out the door, too wet to come inside. When dry enough, the house would be my submarine, my bed the control deck, and the wind and rain against the windows making it reality. Today, however, something has changed. It is obvious that I have become a different person from my toddler self, but I feel it most in the rainy days. Water that inevitably collects on whatever footwear I choose seems to permeate far deeper, dissolving my most obscure thoughts, making me conscious of things I do not typically realize.
First to be hit by this penetrating solvent are my common trivial worries. Problems that usually can be handled without much mental effort begin to require a much greater expenditure on my part, and things that seem insignificant in the sun soak up this water like a sponge, expanding in their size and severity, becoming foaming, peaking monstrosities that throw me back on the sand, coughing up salt water. This is only the beginning.
I dread, most of all, the hour when this water arrives at my inner mind, meets those thoughts that are normally lost in the far reaches of the brain, too unsavory to keep for very long. They become surprisingly buoyant in rainwater, break the surface all too easily, thoroughly inescapable. I am then conscious of all the things that I should have done but neglected to do, all the things that I lack, all the ways in which my life has become less than it could be. Thought processes that my mind rejects on a sunny afternoon emerge in the dark of the pounding water and after an extended period of rainy weather become almost impossible to drown again. A cycle begins. These rain-thoughts lead to others like them, which give way to storm-thoughts, which yield easily to the hurricane ones.
This is what I have become: a puppet of the weather. Mother Nature must gain great satisfaction from my inability to cope with her creations' if she is the crude, scheming mastermind I believe her to be. I have, over time, developed a defense against these campaigns of water. After a time, I begin to convince myself that the fault lies with me, not with an enemy at her controls in the sky. After all, if she can bring on rain, she must be the one behind the sunlight as well. As ridiculous as it sounds, maybe the rain truly is only to make the pleasing greens greener, which is in the end for my benefit. So I wait for the torrents to exhaust themselves. After all, the sun will come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar.